received on the next day, the 18th. Creevey went off to his club and
wrote: “Nothing can be more triumphant for the Queen than this day
altogether.... The Law Officers of the Crown are damnably overweighted
by Brougham and Denman.” The next day the facts adduced by the Attorney
General made things look bad. A less numerous and reputable crowd
appeared to cheer the Queen on the 22d. “Now,” writes Creevey, “her
danger begins.” But then things began to mend; the witness in whom
the prosecution had most confidence was a certain Teodoro Majocchi.
Brougham forced him to contradict himself, and seeing how he was
being driven into admissions, the witness continually replied, _Non
mi ricordo_, “I don’t remember,” a phrase which became for a time
proverbial. There were very few English witnesses, but when Creevey, on
Aug. 25, mentioned this to the Duke of Wellington, his Grace replied,
“Ho! but we have a great many English witnesses--officers.” “And this
was the thing,” writes Creevey, “which frightened me most.” On the
26th the evidence of a chambermaid gave trouble, and Creevey is angry
with the Queen. “This,” to quote him, “gives considerable--indeed very
great advantage--to the case of that eternal fool, to call her (the
Queen) no worse name.” A few days later, Sept. 8, he calls her “the
idiot.”--The next day the House adjourned till the 3d October, and
the divorce clause was dropped. Creevey remarks that now the Bill of
Pains and Penalties was really directed against the King: its object
being “to declare the Queen an abandoned woman, and the King a fit
associate for her!” When the House sat on Oct. 3, Mr. Brougham made
his great speech for the defence. On the 6th it came out that the
husband of the Queen’s friend, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, had sold his
wife’s letters to the Treasury. On the 9th Creevey reports “the town
literally drunk with joy at the unparalleled triumph of the Queen.” But
at 4 P.M. the weather changed. Two Naval officers, Flynn and Hownam,
were called for the defence, and broke down under cross examination, so
that the Queen’s guilt became almost certain. Then the government lost
its advantage by committing the mistake of letting a witness, who was
to have been indicted for perjury, leave the country. On the 13th the
Duke of Norfolk wrote to Creevey, saying that “if this horrible bill”
passed, he would feel no regret that as a Roman Catholic he could not
take his seat as a Peer. At last, on Oct. 24, the trial was nearing its
end and Denman began to sum up. The attack he made on the King and the
Duke of Clarence, who had been especially bitter against the Queen, is
a striking example of the freedom allowed to a British advocate. He
compared the case to the dismissal of the virtuous Octavia by Nero and
the examination of her servants by his infamous minister, Tigellinus.
He looked at the Duke of Clarence and declared that he ought to come
forward as a witness and not whisper slanders against Caroline. The
Queen, he said, might well exclaim, “Come forth, thou slanderer, and
let me see thy face! If thou would’st equal the respectability of an
Italian witness, come forth and depose in open court. As thou art, thou
art worse than an Italian assassin! Because, while I am boldly and
manfully meeting my accusers, thou art plunging a dagger unseen into my
bosom.”
In his peroration Denman made a most unlucky slip, but he faithfully
reproduced the irrational attitude of public opinion.[28] The people
believed the Queen guilty and yet desired her acquittal. She had
suffered so cruelly, she had been so shamefully treated, her ruin had
been sought by employing spies against her, her accusers were worse
than she. So Denman quoted the divine words to less guilty accusers of
a sinful woman--“Go and sin no more,”--whereupon a wag wrote:
“Most gracious Queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more;
But if that effort be too great,
To go away, at any rate.”
Then followed the debate, and on the 6th of November, even with the
aid of eleven of the bishops, there was a majority of only 28 in
favour of the Bill of Pains and Penalties. The feeling of the peers
was in accordance with Denman’s peroration. Caroline was guilty but
ought not to be punished. Said Lord Ellenborough: “No man who had
heard the evidence would say that the Queen of England was not the
last woman in the country which a man of honour would wish his wife to
resemble, or the father of a family would recommend as an example to
his daughters.” (_Loud cheers._) But he voted against the bill. On Nov.
8 it was proposed that the divorce clause should be tacked on to the
bill. Creevey writes (Nov. 10): “_Three times three!_ if you please,
before you read a word further.--The Bill has gone, thank God! to the
devil. Their majority was brought down to 9 ... and then the dolorous
Liverpool came forward and _struck_. He moved that his own bill be read
this day six months.” “I was a bad boy,” he writes next morning, “and
drank an extra bottle of claret with Foley, Dundas, etc.” I need not
tell the rest of poor Caroline’s story, how public feeling calmed down,
especially when Parliament voted her £50,000 ($250,000) a year. How
she tried to attend the Coronation, how she died, and the King ordered
the body not to be taken through London, and how the people rose and
forced the funeral procession to pass through the city, how at last
she found rest among her ancestors in her native Brunswick. Time will
not permit me to do more than allude to George’s visit to Ireland at
the very time his injured wife was dying, and his speech: “This is one
of the happiest days of my life. I have long wished to visit you. My
heart has always been Irish. Go and do by me as I shall do by you. Go
and drink my health in a bumper. I shall drink all yours in a bumper of
Irish whiskey.”
Well might Byron celebrate the occasion of the Irish visit and the
King’s tumultuous welcome:
“Is it madness or meanness which clings to thee now?
Were he God--as he is but the commonest clay,
With scarce fewer wrinkles than sins on his brow--Such
servile devotion might shame him away.
Ay, roar in his train! Let their orators lash
Their fanciful spirit to pamper his pride.”
I am afraid I have occupied much time with this famous trial. Had I
told you the evidence in the least detail I should only have inspired
disgust. Nor should I have selected the subject except for a special
reason.
Though no results immediately followed, even though George IV recovered
his popularity in a measure,--for he was a very clever and could be a
very charming man,--yet the very fact that the bill was introduced into
the House of Lords ranged public opinion against that branch of the
Legislature as nothing previously seemed to have done. It brought about
the time when the days of the aristocracy as the sole influence in
government were to be numbered. Peers were no longer to be allowed the
enormous privileges they had enjoyed. They had ranged themselves on
the side of the throne in an unjust cause,--not because they cared for
the King,--but because they considered their interests and his to be
identical. The Reform Bill of 1832 was the answer of the English middle
class to the Bill of Pains and Penalties of 1820.
FOOTNOTES:
[25] Disraeli’s “Sybil” gives a scathing portraiture of the great Whig
families in his sketch of the career of the Earls of Marney.
[26] Quoted from Thackeray’s “Four Georges.”
[27] Which made illegal any marriage contracted by a prince of the
blood without the consent of King and Parliament.
[28] I am informed by a friend, Mr. Denman, a grandson of Caroline’s
Counsel, that the words were not used in the speech, which was reported
wrongly in the _Annual Register_.
LECTURE VI
SOCIAL ABUSES AS EXPOSED BY CHARLES DICKENS
Let us revel in the company of a writer who has been perhaps even more
appreciated in America than in his own country: and will you allow
me to express my opinion that the greatest proof of the magnanimity
of your fathers was shown in the fact that they forgave “Martin
Chuzzlewit,” and took its author to their heart? No little man, and
for that matter little nation, can bear to be caricatured. Many even
who possess true greatness cannot endure ridicule. It must remain to
the eternal credit of your country that Charles Dickens was beloved by
it. Nowhere did the creator of “our Elijah Pogram,” Hannibal Chollop,
Mrs. Hominy, and Mr. Scadder find a warmer welcome than in the country
where he discovered their prototypes; and his popularity in America is
a testimony to the good humour and generosity of its people.
My object in this lecture is to endeavour to explain the England which
Dickens described; and I will with your permission preface my remarks
by pointing out some of the disadvantages of an old society, bearing in
mind its advantages also. The England in which Dickens worked was in
many respects simpler in life, yet more fertile in types of character,
than it is at present. I cannot but think that people got more pleasure
out of living than they do in our days. Yet if I may venture upon a
paradox, the world of “Pickwick” was older, and not younger, than the
one in which we are living.
Strictly speaking, modern England is not an “_old_” country, but a new
one. Steam and electricity, the progress of science and the advance of
democratic ideas have inaugurated a new age; and we, as well as you in
America, live in days of experiment rather than of tradition. But the
England of the thirties was an old country. It was changing rapidly,
it is true; yet it is scarce an exaggeration to say that it bore a
greater resemblance to the England of Queen Elizabeth than to that of
the present day; but the institutions of the past, which had changed
very little in character, had become more intolerable as civilisation
advanced; and, consecrated by time, they pressed very heavily on the
many to the great benefit of the few interested in their maintenance.
The main thesis I shall put before you to-day is that it is time that
an edition of Dickens appeared with a good popular commentary; for much
of it is not intelligible even to an English reader at the present day:
and one thing which the volumes should have is a map of the London
which he is so fond of describing. Most of the sites have become so
changed as to be hardly recognisable; and the appearance of the streets
is so altered that one can hardly reconstruct them even in imagination.
It would be no difficult task to find plans and pictures to assist one
in this direction, and the result would, I think, be most illuminating
to the reader. The prisons, for example, of which we read so much, the
Fleet, the Marshalsea, Newgate itself, have all disappeared, and few
now know even where the two former actually stood. As to the notes and
comments which might be written, I hope this lecture may indicate what
I mean.
The first novel I shall take is “Oliver Twist” because it--despite the
charm of the story--is almost unintelligible to the ordinary reader,
where it deals with the conditions of the lives of the very poor and
of the criminal classes. I need hardly remind you of the details.
There is the poor little boy born and bred in the workhouse under Mr.
Bumble the beadle, his being apprenticed, his escape to London, and
his introduction to the thieves’ school kept by the Jew Fagin, the
devilish plot to make him a criminal, his escape, and his restoration
to his family. A character like Fagin’s would be impossible in London
at the present day. There may be equally dangerous criminals; but he
was protected by a system which is now happily entirely obsolete. His
infamous trade was to train up criminals whom he finally handed over to
the arm of the law.
“I say,” said the other (the landlord of the Cripple), “what a time
this would be for a sell. I’ve got Phil Barker here: so drunk that a
boy might take him.” “Aha! but it’s not Phil Barker’s time,” said the
Jew, looking up. “Phil has something more to do, before we can afford
to part with him, so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them
to lead merry lives--_while they last_, ha! ha! ha!”
And again:
“Change it,” exclaimed the Jew (to Nancy).... “I will change it!
Listen to me, you drab. Listen to me, who with six words can strangle
Sykes, as surely as if I had his bull’s throat between my fingers now.
If he comes back and leaves that boy behind him,--if he gets off free,
and dead or alive fails to restore him to me--murder him yourself if
you would have him escape Jack Ketch: and do it the moment he sets
foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too late!”
These were no empty boasts. Fagin had literally the lives of all who
thieved for him in his pocket, and this is the motive of the plot of
the story. The object of Fagin is to get Oliver Twist to commit some
crime and thus be able to hand him over to the police as soon as it
was convenient to do so. Let us see how this could be managed. There
were practically no police. London was protected by a horse patrol in
the suburbs and a small foot patrol in the streets. Each parish had its
own watchman, who might not under any circumstances leave his beat,
not even to prevent a felony. The parish constable or headborough was
paid a ridiculous wage: in the great parish of Shoreditch he received
£4.10.0 ($22.50) a year. Yet it was, what with blackmail and fees, a
lucrative office. If the headborough prosecuted, he could get expenses
at the rate of $6 a day and more, and he could bring in any other
friend who held the same office as a witness--expenses paid.
Crime was prevented by encouraging informers. A man could get £40
($200) for information which led to a capital conviction, and he could
sell the exemption which he also gained from serving in a public office
in the parish for a similar sum. It became actually in the interest
of the thief takers to allow young persons and even children to commit
minor crimes in the hope that sooner or later they would be guilty of
worse offences. It was naturally the prime object of the informer to
obtain a conviction. Fagin combined the work of a receiver of stolen
goods with that of a thief taker.
The administration of the workhouse system was equally bad. The humour
with which Dickens describes Mr. Bumble the beadle, his pomposity, his
courtship of the matron, and his fall, is delightful; but Mr. Bumble,
the visiting magistrates, and the overseers of the poor represented a
state of things almost unthinkable in its brutality. Oliver himself was
nearly being apprenticed to a sweep who would certainly have treated
him much as Crabbe’s “Peter Grimes” treated his apprentice, and this
dialogue between Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann, the nurse of the pauper
children, reveals the spirit with which the indigent poor were treated.
“Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.”
“Lawk, Mr. Bumble,” said Mrs. Mann, starting back.
“To London, ma’am,” resumed the inflexible beadle, “by coach. I
and two paupers, Mrs. Mann! A legal action is a-coming on, and the
board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to depose to the matter at
Clerkenwell....”
“You are going by coach, Sir? I thought it was always usual to send
them paupers in carts.”
“That’s when they’re ill, Mrs. Mann,” said the beadle. “We put sick
paupers in carts in rainy weather, to prevent their taking cold.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Mann.
“The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,”
said Mr. Bumble. “They are both in a very low state, and we find it
would come two pounds cheaper to move ’em than to bury them--that is,
if we can throw ’em upon another parish, which I think we shall be
able to do, if they don’t die upon the road to spite us. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little his eyes again encountered the
cocked hat; and he became grave.[29]
Here is fiction: let us turn to facts as we find them in a history of
the England of the period:
The parish had the right to apprentice the children of poor parents
to any trade.... Children under this law might be sent to any part of
the Kingdom. “It is a very common practice,” wrote Romilly in 1811,
“with the great populous parishes in London to bind children in large
numbers to the proprietors of cotton mills ... at a distance of 200
miles.... The children, who are sent off by waggon loads at a time,
are as much lost for ever to their parents as if they were shipped off
for the West Indies. The parishes that bind them get rid of them for
ever, and the poor children have not a human being in the world to whom
they can look up for redress ... from these wholesale dealers whose
object it is to get everything that they can wring from their excessive
labours and fatigue.... Instances (and not very few) have occurred
in our criminal tribunals of wretches who have murdered their parish
apprentices that they might get fresh premiums with new apprentices.”
Some manufacturers, it is shocking to state, agreed to take one idiot
for every nineteen sane children.
Even naturally humane men were found to defend these dreadful abuses
in the House of Commons. Here is an extract from a speech: “Although
in the higher ranks of society it was true that to cultivate the
affections of children for their family was the source of every
virtue, yet it was not so among the lower orders.... It would be
highly injurious to the public to put a stop to the binding of so many
apprentices to the cotton manufacturers, as it must necessarily raise
the price of labour and enhance the price of cotton manufactured goods!”
We turn next to the debtor’s prison which is so prominent in the
“Pickwick Papers.” So resolute was Mr. Pickwick not to submit to the
judgment against him in the famous trial that he allowed himself to
be imprisoned in the Fleet. He was first put into the Warden’s room
with several other prisoners. When he entered the room, the others
were absent. “So he sat down on the foot of his little iron bedstead,
and began to wonder how much a year the warden made out of the dirty
room. Having satisfied himself, by mathematical calculation, that the
apartment was about equal in annual value to a freehold in a small
street in the suburbs of London,” etc., etc.
Here we have one of the great abuses of the horrible “debtor’s prisons”
in London. They were jobbed by the officials, and the bare decencies
of life could only be obtained by a heavy payment. The warders charged
£1.1.0. on entrance for “garnish,” which was supposed to provide coals,
candles, brooms, etc., and exorbitant fees were demanded for rooms. The
state of those who could not pay was deplorable. In the prison of the
Court of Requests at Birmingham, according to the Parliamentary papers
of 1844, eight years after “Pickwick” was written, the male prisoners
slept in an attic eleven feet long by sixteen broad on platforms
littered with loose straw. For exercise, at Kidderminster they walked
in a yard thirteen yards square; and their room was without even a
fireplace. For food they were allowed one quarter of a loaf of bread
and were allowed two jugfuls of water for drinking and washing.
In 1827 nearly 6000 persons in London were imprisoned for debt. We read
constantly in Dickens of Chancery prisoners, especially in “Little
Dorrit”; men who had been thrown into gaol to rot there for years
because they could not pay for suits in which they had been quite
unwillingly involved. The absurdity of the system was enhanced by the
fact that they were deprived of any chance of working to pay their
debts. Many were forgotten and left literally to rot. They were not
even allowed to escape by bankruptcy; for unless a man failed in trade
he could not claim that relief, nor could his property be divided among
his creditors. The law thus gave no means of escape to the debtor nor
of payment to the creditor.
Imprisonment for debt was not abolished in England till 1869; and it is
now only allowed by order of the court in the case of small debts which
people can but will not pay.
The horrors of the prisons which Howard and Elizabeth Fry, for all
their gallant efforts, were powerless to remove, gave rise to a wave
of public sentiment which carried their administration to an opposite
extreme. Dickens saw this and exposed the folly of the movement in
“David Copperfield.” You will doubtless remember that David’s old
schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle, of Salem House, suddenly developed from a
brutal pedagogue into an ardent philanthropist, after having become
a Middlesex magistrate, and devoted himself to the well-being of
criminals. Copperfield, as the rising author of the day (Dickens
himself), is invited to see a new model prison and takes his old friend
Traddles with him.
“It was an immense and solid building, erected at a vast expense. I
could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar
would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to
spend one half the money on the erection of an industrial school for
the young or a house of refuge for the deserving old. In the kitchen
repasts were being prepared for the prisoners, so delicate that none of
our soldiers, sailors, labourers, or workmen could hope ever to dine
half so well.”
There, in a most comfortable cell, our friends find Uriah Heep reading
a hymn book, canting and complaining of the toughness of the beef; and
Mr. Littimer, Steerforth’s infamous valet, gently hinting that the milk
supplied might have been adulterated. To illustrate this I turned to
the old numbers of _Punch_ of the day, a study of which, comic paper
though it be, is one of the best illustrations of the current life and
thought of every period since it appeared in 1839. There one finds
innumerable jokes and pictures of convicts enjoying every sort of
luxury, obsequiously waited on by the warders. Prison reform had to be
irrational before it could become sane; for, as David Copperfield says,
“Perhaps it is a good thing to have an unsound hobby ridden hard; for
it’s the sooner ridden to death.”
Next we come to an abuse, on which I must speak with much diffidence,
for no one but a trained lawyer could properly discuss it--the Court
of Chancery. It is the theme of much of Dickens’ best work and is the
whole motive of “Bleak House” and the famous Jarndyce and Jarndyce
lawsuit. The mixture of humour and pathos in the treatment of this
subject tempts me to digress a little before explaining as best I may
the actual state of the law at the time. We are introduced to those
who were interested in the vast machinery of the Court of Chancery,
as the great Jarndyce case drags its slow length along from the Lord
Chancellor down to the starving law writer. We see suitors of every
description like the “man from Shropshire” and “Miss Flyte.” We seem to
smell the musty law papers as we read the book. I confess to feeling
almost maddened by the callous slowness with which Mr. Vholes the
solicitor, who “maintained an aged father in the Vale of Taunton,”
played with the hopes and fears of the anxious suitors. The eminent
respectability of such a practitioner, adds Dickens, was always quoted
whenever a commission sat to see whether the business of the Court
could be expedited. We laugh, but the tears are not far off, at the
humour of such people as Miss Flyte, Mr. Gruppy, Conversation Kenge;
yet we feel the pathos of all the woe and disappointment caused by the
delays of the monstrous machine of the Law.
To Dickens the Court of Chancery represented two things: first it
stood for oppression. It appeared to him a vast system backed by vested
interests, which sucked unhappy suitors into litigation against their
will, fettered and crippled them for the rest of their lives, and, in
many cases, ultimately consigned them to the despairing misery of a
debtor’s prison.
It drove men and women to madness, like poor Miss Flyte, or made them
misanthropes, like Mr. Grindley, “the man from Shropshire.” It made
wretched, half-ruined people hang about the courts day after day
expecting a judgment, it caused houses to fall into ruin, and whole
streets to become deserted because Chancery could not decide to whom
they belonged. Listen to “the man from Shropshire’s” description of his
own case:
“Mr. Jarndyce, consider my case. As there is a heaven above us, this
is my case. I am one of two brothers. My father (a farmer) made a
will and left his farm and stock to my mother for her life. After my
mother’s death, all was to come to me, except a legacy of £300 that I
was to pay to my brother.”
The brother claimed the legacy, Grindley said he had had some of it,
and the brother filed a bill in Chancery.
“Seventeen persons were made defendants in this simple suit.” Two years
elapsed and the Master in Chancery then found there ought to be another
defendant, and all the proceedings were quashed. “The costs at that
time--before the suit had begun, were three times the legacy.”
The brother tried to back out, but the court would not let him. The
whole property was sucked away in a suit which common-sense could have
decided in a day.
The demoralising effect of a court so dilatory and so capricious also
revealed itself in its influence on character. Men and women spent
their lives in waiting for a decision and found it impossible to settle
to any regular calling.
The court was, in fact, like a gigantic lottery. A favourable decision
might make a man wealthy in a day, and with such a prospect it was
impossible for him to settle down to the drudgery of a profession.
In addition to this, so conflicting were the interests involved that
families were divided hopelessly.
How pathetically does Dickens sketch the character of Richard Carstone!
He tries physic, the army, the law, and cannot stick to any as his
vocation. He feels that at any time the Jarndyce case may make him
a rich man. His only hope is to drive it to a conclusion. Under the
influence of Mr. Vholes he learns to distrust his old friend Mr. John
Jarndyce, and even, in part, his betrothed, the sweet Ada, because they
too have interests in the suit. When the case comes to an end by all
the money being absorbed in costs, he dies, despairing yet penitent.
Let us now see how the bare facts, stripped of romance, appear.